Henry Hitchings > Quotes

“The history of prescriptions about English ... is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance. But it is also a history of attempts to make sense of the world and its bazaar of competing ideas and interests.”
― Henry Hitchings

“On loof, literally ‘on rudder’, was a Dutch phrase spoken by the captain of a vessel when he wanted to steer a course away from a hazard such as a reef. It became aloof, a word that extended this idea of avoidance and evasion.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“In Fernand Braudel’s chastening phrase, ‘Europe is an Asian peninsula.’3 It is a given that Europeans underestimate the scale and resources and history of Asia – and do so recklessly. By looking at English’s Arabic connection, we can begin to correct this. Sugar”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“The Rambler gave Johnson an opportunity to try out words he had encountered during his reading for the Dictionary: words like ‘adscititious’, ‘efflorescence’, ‘equiponderant’, ‘quadrature’, ‘to superinduce’ and ‘terraqueous’.5 While his taste for these difficult terms can look like a form of intellectual self-display, it is symptomatic of the widespread eighteenth-century conflation of what we would now call ‘science’ with the language of power and argument. 6 Although the particular character of Johnson’s rhetoric is inherited from seventeenth-century natural philosophy, rather than empowered by the latest mid-eighteenth-century developments, he remains an influential figure in giving the specialized terms of natural philosophy a real public currency. In”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Johnson continually sketched out ideas for books he hoped, aspired or intended to write. These included a history of criticism, a set of biographies of the great philosophers ‘written with a polite air’, a history of Venice, a prayer book, a dictionary of ancient mythology, editions of Chaucer and Bacon, a compendium of proverbs, a collection of epigrams, a history of the ‘revival of learning’ in Renaissance Europe, a cookbook laid out ‘upon philosophical principles’, a history of his melancholy, and an autobiography (these last two surely very much”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Johnson’s decision to employ these particular men was partly motivated by charity. He rotated them as his needs (or theirs) dictated, and offered accommodation to those who could not afford lodgings elsewhere. The amanuenses were his servants, but also his companions—dogsbodies with the status of intimates, hirelings who doubled as friends. Their presence in the background is a reminder”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“What, then, did the finished Dictionary look like? What kind of a feel did it have? It was, in the first place, a large, cumbersome item, weighing around twenty pounds—the same as a very big Christmas turkey. It was plainly intended to be bound in two volumes: at the end of the Grammar there were directions for the bookbinder, who was requested to bind the entries from A to K in one volume, and those from L to Z in a second. Some owners ignored this suggestion, possibly for aesthetic reasons, but more probably for practical ones.”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Language is a social energy, and our capacity for articulate speech is the key factor that makes us different from other species. We are not as fast as cheetahs – or even as horses. Nor are we as strong as bulls or as adaptable as bacteria. But our brains are equipped with the facility to produce and process speech, and we are capable of abstract thought. A bee may dance to show other bees the location of a source of food, a green monkey may deliver sophisticated vocal signals, and a sparrow may manage as many as thirteen different types of song, but an animal's system of communication has a limited repertoire; ours, on the other hand, is 'open', and its mechanisms permit a potentially infinite variety of utterances.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“the Middle Ages meetings were armed encounters: local disputes were settled by means of a ‘moot’, at which proposals were approved with a banging together of weapons – or dismissed with groans. These attempts to negotiate arguments gradually became less military in temper. During the Renaissance, urbanization and political centralization gave rise to a more parliamentary style of meeting, over which courtiers presided. Urbane discussion became the mechanism for resolving or curtailing differences and achieving solidarity. Yet even in the nineteenth century the word meeting was a euphemism for a duel – a hangover from a less bureaucratic age. And today meeting is associated with other ways of taking lives or at least sapping vitality. The”
― Henry Hitchings, Sorry!: The English and Their Manners

“In his entry under the verb ‘to antedate’, Johnson quotes the essayist Jeremy Collier: ‘By reading, a man does, as it were, antedate his life, and makes himself contemporary with the ages past.’ It is Johnson’s engagement with the past and his revival of a diffuse pot-pourri of materials that make the Dictionary such an unexpectedly vibrant work. At”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Among more recent innovators was the Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov, whose novel Bend Sinister is trophied with delightful oddities like kwazinka (‘a slit between the folding parts of a screen’) and shchekotiki (which is ‘half-tingle, half-tickle’).6”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“He had trouble with his eyes and his lungs, and with insomnia and asthma; suffered from gout and rheumatoid arthritis; experienced dropsy, emphysema and at least one fainting fit; and in his seventies developed a malignant tumour on his left testicle. To combat these problems, he consumed a vast quantity of medicines: opium, oil of terebinth, valerian, ipecacuanha, dried orange peel in hot red port, salts of hartshorn, musk, dried squills, and Spanish fly. He was frequently bled, for complaints as disparate as flatulence and an eye infection. Yet Johnson’s most enduring malady was mental. Throughout his life he suffered from a profound melancholy which periodically surged towards madness. It was this, much more than any other ailment, that blighted his middle years. No”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“It is the sort of book that has to be rested on a table or a lectern; it is not easy to lift a volume one-handed, and only a basketball player would be able to hold it up and open with a single hand. With its pages spread, it is almost twenty inches wide, and the pages are a foot and half in length; stacked, the four volumes make a pile nearly ten inches high. Johnson’s finished tome was stately in appearance—‘Vasta mole superbus’ (‘Proud in its great bulk’), as he beamingly described it in a letter to Thomas Warton.1”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“The Dictionary contains the names of numerous card games: among them piquet, quadrille, ombre, basset, whist, lansquenet and”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“is possible, too, that OK has its origins in the Wolof waw kay. That said, the expression has also been claimed as Greek, Finnish, Gaelic, Choctaw and French; as an abbreviation of the faintly humorous misspelling Orl Korrect or of Obediah Kelly, the name of a freight agent who initialled documents he’d checked; and as an inversion of the boxing term KO (knock-out), used because a boxer who hadn’t been knocked out was considered to be … well, OK.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“The Western impression of Africa and Asia was that they were hazardous and uncivilized, full of gargantuan lizards, men with the heads of dogs, eels many hundreds of feet long, and creatures like the monoceros, which was alleged to have a stag’s head, the body of a horse, and feet like an elephant’s. The”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“The nineteenth-century clergyman William Barnes preferred wheelsaddle to bicycle and folkwain to omnibus. By the same token forceps would be nipperlings, and pathology would be painlore. Some of his new words recalled the language of Old English poetry: he proposed glee-mote in place of concert, and the wonderful cellar-thane instead of butler.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Johnson stigmatizes words of which he disapproves. He does this by applying denigratory labels to them. ‘To ponder on’ is ‘improper’, ‘ambassadress’ is ‘ludicrous’, ‘bouncer’ (meaning ‘an empty threatener’) is ‘colloquial’, ‘overwhelmingly’ is ‘inelegant’, the alarming-sounding ‘to powder’ (‘to come tumultuously and violently’) is ‘corrupt’, ‘coxcomical’ is ‘unworthy of use’, ‘from hence’ is ‘vitious’,”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Lord Macaulay, ready as ever with a flush of gorgeous hyperbole, evokes the circumstances of the Grub Street authors: Sometimes blazing in gold-laced hats and waistcoats; sometimes lying in bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or wearing paper cravats because their linen was in pawn; sometimes drinking champagne and Tokay with Betty Careless; sometimes standing at the window of an eating-house in Porridge Island, to snuff up the scent of what they could not afford to taste; they knew luxury; they knew beggary; but they never knew comfort. He goes on, ‘They looked on a regular and frugal life with the same aversion which an old gypsy or a Mohawk hunter feels for a stationary abode … They were as untameable, as much wedded to their desolate freedom, as the wild ass.”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Czech noun related to the German noun Arbeit and meaning ‘forced labour’, to signify a new type of ‘artificial’ being, assembled like a car and programmed to be of service to humans.14 This choice of word was inspired by a conversation with his brother Josef, a painter of the cubist school. It would become an emblem of the future’s potential. The”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“These many and very different Sources of our Language may be the cause, why it so deficient in Regularity … Yet we have this advantage to compensate the defect, that what we want in Elegance, we gain in Copiousness.’2 These”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“We owe pandemonium to Milton’s Paradise Lost (where it is ‘the high Capital of Satan and his Peers’), diplomacy to Edmund Burke, and pessimism to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Censorship diminished, and copyright was originated. Moreover, the early years of the eighteenth century gave rise to a galaxy of new phenomena that included the printed handbill, printed receipts, printed tickets, printed advertisements, and posters. At the same time there was a surge in the production of political pamphlets, broadsides, books for children, and even street maps. Alexander Pope satirized the rage for print in his poem The Dunciad (1728–43); he mockingly suggested that its democratizing power had brought ‘the Smithfield Muses to the Ear of Kings’. Johnson echoed Pope’s sentiments, complaining that ‘so widely is spread the itch of literary praise, that almost every man is an author, either in act or in purpose’.3”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Dictionary he identifies ‘what ills the scholar’s life assail’: ‘Toil, envy, want, the garret, and the jail’. The last of these was always a genuine possibility: it was common for people owing even modest debts to be incarcerated, and several writers known to Johnson had suffered this fate—the”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Of the approximately 27,000 words identified in the OED as having first been used between 1250 and 1450, more than a fifth have French origins, and more than three-quarters of these are nouns.43 About half of all words in common use are nouns, and the introduction of new nouns – so many of them material – marks the discovery of new things, new experiences, new attitudes. Nouns”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“In Eric Partridge’s book The Gentle Art of Lexicography, there is a story about an elderly lady ‘who, on borrowing a dictionary from her municipal library, returned it with the comment, “A very unusual book indeed—but the stories are extremely short, aren’t they?”’3”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“Often we have three terms for the same thing--one Anglo-Saxon, one French, and one clearly absorbed from Latin or Greek. The Anglo-Saxon word is typically a neutral one; the French word connotes sophistication; and the Latin or Greek word, learnt from a written text rather than from human contact, is comparatively abstract and conveys a more scientific notion.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Gin, often referred to as ‘Madam Geneva’ (and sometimes as ‘Kill-Grief’), was a national obsession. It had first arrived in England in the 1680s, along with William of Orange. Fifty years later, as many as one in ten London properties was a gin shop. According to official records, nearly 7 million gallons were consumed in 1730, and this figure excludes the vast quantities of low-grade gin sold from wheelbarrows, which was often adulterated with turpentine.7 The sale of spirits was officially prohibited in 1736, but the measure was so unsuccessful that prohibition was lifted seven years later, and a more pragmatic approach resulted in the Gin Act of 1751,”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

“The noun algorithm has become quite common in an age of computerized calculations, although it did not make its first appearance until 1957. Previously the word had been algorism, which was a corruption of the final part of the name of a ninth-century mathematician, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi: the Latin algoritmi was an approximation of al-Khwarizmi, which meant ‘the man from Chorasmia’ (today the Khorezm province of Uzbekistan).”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“gloomy, pensive, discontented temper This melancholy flatters, but unmans you; What is it else but penury of soul, A lazy frost, a numbness of the mind? —JOHN DRYDEN AT”
― Henry Hitchings, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary